That's Just the Way It Is
by LoveBlink182
Summary: Reflecting on loneliness is a lonely thing. Isolation is hard to get rid of, especially when you don't belong anywhere.


AN: Not too sure when this takes place. It was just...In my head, creating orbs of creativity in my guts, presenting me with a need to write and draw. JCV owns JtHM, not me. Tell me whether or not to make it multi-chapter, cause I'm lost hehe.

**_That's Just The Way It Is:_**

Johnny looked around. This place. This place and its people. They revolted him. He couldn't keep doing this, changing his moods like this. He just couldn't. It was insane.

Ironically, but still quite insane.

He wasn't Indiana Jones; he couldn't keep taking leaps of twisted faith like this and live to tell the tale. He needed to leave this city. Los Angeles and its slums. Not that he lived in a ghetto, but it was still revolting.

But where? Where could he move? Out of the general area, no doubt. But where would he go? Born and raised a city guy, he couldn't move someplace rural. He couldn't move to the boondocks, yet he couldn't stay in the city without going completely mad. The city and its bad habits swallowed up his few friends.

Phlegm. Biff. Mace. He could remember how all of them had fallen victim to the streets, the ways.

Phlegm. His best friend since grade school. Consumed by heroin and other drugs. His brain was mush when Nny finally ended it. With a gun. This thought made him want to vomit.

Taking the life of someone. That's one belief that would never waver, how the world would be so much better if people only used guns on themselves. Stupidly, though, it wasn't the last life he'd take with a gun.

Biff, a good friend of his he'd met his freshman year. He, too, had grown up without much guidance, his parents gone from the scene of his upbringing. Thus, he lacked the family unit he felt he needed. Joining a gang, one which Johnny had forgotten the name of, he was killed in a shootout.

And, yet another fine example of the pit of sticky, searing tar that this city actually was, his friend Mace. She had been romantically involved with a guy who had used her as a scapegoat. She died of lethal injection some years ago. Despite Nny's warnings of his violent and less-than-caring attitude towards his girlfriends, she still insisted on being with him.

Johnny could remember stalking the man a few days after her arrest and sentencing. How he screamed for mercy. He begged for his life, telling Johnny he would give him whatever he wanted. Johnny requested that he turn himself in so he could get his friend out of the women's penitentiary on the west side. The man disagreed. Insisted that it was "that stupid bitches fault for trusting someone so obviously fucked up." Johnny remembered agreeing with him and castrating him, among other things, and then finally cutting enough parts out and killing him.

Like he had done to Phlegm's dealer, to the man who shot Biff, and Biff's "family".

Despite his white-knuckled grip on them, he had lost every friend he'd ever had to this place, unwillingly letting them slip under the tar and suffocating, but not for lack of trying.

The warnings he gave rang clearly through his head.

"Don't! Phlegm, you hole! That shit will kill you!"

"Please, Biff. We can be family for each other. You don't need those vile rodents! I'm in the same boat and I'm not sinking to the level of keeping company of these fucktards!"

"Mace, please. For the good name of intelligent women everywhere, don't trust this guy! He's tainted, he's vile! There's nothing GOOD about a fuck-head like this!"

These thoughts made him shiver. Make him want to vomit. Why didn't they just listen to him? He was so sick of people blowing him off completely, when they knew he was right, when HE knew he was right. It was ridiculous.

No reason for the fates of his friends.

Friends. What a quaint word. If they were really his friends, wouldn't they have trusted him? Wouldn't they be here, next to him, deciding where to go to get away from these people? Yes. They would.

But he couldn't bring himself to hate them. They had fallen through the cracks, like everyone else in this place. This wasteland of society. He didn't expect much more from the other cities in the world.

Almost nothing less, actually. A thought that made him not want to be where he was. Again.

Nothing ever changed. There was nothing different about his "friends" than there was about anyone else in this city who had been swallowed by the system, by the executives who sat in their offices munching on foot long sandwiches while people starved in the alleyways next to them.

"Devi..." He whispered.

She hadn't been tainted by the world. Just scared to unimaginable extents. He had most definitely helped that. He noticed she no longer worked at the book store. He had heard a friend, Tenna he believed her name was, say she worked as a freelance artist.

He couldn't help but think of Todd, or, Squee as he and seemingly everyone else liked to call him. So careful, so innocent. So incredibly uncorrupt. So untainted. His goal was just to keep that vile bastard Shmee near him and stay away from danger and trouble. He didn't deserve things like Shmee, and his disgusting parents, and his scary friends like Pepito, Satan's son.

_Perhaps he would like to take a 'vacation' with me...Maybe he'd like to get out of this place, too. I hope so. A companion in this would be delightful..._

A companion.

Wouldn't that be lovely?

A real friend, someone who listened to his advice.

Someone really, really real, someone who would take his advice, someone who would like him.

He could've had that, had he not killed that man, that Edgar Vargas guy. Had he not scared away Devi.

_So technically...Some of my isolation is my own fault. But not all of it._

These things tired him. He walked into his room and started to pack. He'd find a place to stay without insanity ensuing like always.

If he had to leave the planet, he'd find a place to suit him.


End file.
